Pyrolysis of plastic waste : post-treatment and characterisation of the obtained products

Details

Supervisors

Luis Alconero, Patricia ; Mathieu Dubois

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil en chimie et science des matériaux

Abstract

Nowadays, the plastics recycling has become a major environmental issue. The presence in many day-to-day applications and industrial applications involve a large number of waste items when their use comes to their end. The applications of ’one-use’ are especially concerned; for example plastic glass, plastic tableware, food packaging, ... The choice to use these plastic materials is due to their show excellent qualities as easy processing, low costs, low weight and high chemical resistance. Their properties can be easily modified or improved by additives. All those advantages explain the omnipresence of plastic material as the material of choice for any daily or industrial application. Unfortunately, few have been recycled because of their low cost of production. However, by considering only the economic point of view, it leads to the environmental issues such as plastics continent in the oceans and the loss of marine and coastal biodiversity. However, face on the increasing issues of this waste, many research and political projects attempt to find alternative solutions to the incineration, whose fumes are toxic. The aim of the studies is to converted this plastic mix into a valuable liquid fuel. Since the reaction mechanism of the raw material is complex and the composition is subjected to variations, the material pyrolyzed is constituted of one, two or three waste polymers. Those research are carried out principally under fluidized-bed reactor and with catalysts in order to see the influence on the waste material use and thus improve the conversion into liquid fuel. This work is part this momentum in research of this field, linked to public project Recyplus headed by the Walloon competitiveness cluster GreenWin, with the UCL-Suez initiative and in collaboration with the Certech and Center Terre et Pierre asbl (CTP). The pyrolysis is realized on waste plastics coming from different outputs of sorting lines designed by CTP and thus, with different compositions. The pyrolysis experiments are investigated in batch reactor at laboratory-scale and the liquid outputs of hydrocarbons are characterized by a gaseous chromatography-mass spectrometry. The experiments are achieved several times so that it is possible to test the quality of the results and lend weight to the interpretation of composition variation. Some conditions in order to obtain a valuable liquid fuel from these samples have been also investigated